1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a network technology, and more particularly, to a network switching technology.
This work was supported by the IT R&D program of Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC)/Institute for Information Technology Advancement (IITA) [2006-S-064-02, BcN Network Engineering].
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, data traffic in a network may be switched and protected when a failure occurs in a transmission section in which the traffic is sent. For example, when a protection link is designated and a network link failure occurs, the data traffic may be switched and sent through the designated protection link.
Specifically, when a failure occurs in the system, a designated master network device may receive a failure notification from a network device on a packet transmission path. Then, the master network device may switch data traffic to the protection link by activating a previously blocked port.
However, when a path between the network device for providing the failure notification and the master network device is not a short distance, in the above-described method, reception of a failure notification signal may be delayed. For this reason, there is a problem in that the loss of data traffic increases and the network performance decreases when the protection switching is delayed. In particular, there is a problem in that the reception of a switching request signal according to the failure is further delayed when the failure occurs in a link farthest from the master network device.
Accordingly, there is need of an apparatus and method capable of performing fast protection switching even when the distance between the network device for providing the failure notification and the master network device is large.